I'm a Ph.D. student and instructor at Colorado State University. I write about users and the frustrations and joys of our digital lives. In addition to Forbes, I have written for The New Yorker, New York, Salon, National Catholic Reporter, Native American Times, and The Kansas City Star.

Aereo And The Cord Cutters' Ethical Dilemma

I watched USA vs. Portugal on an Xbox streaming app. Not mine, it belonged to a avowed cord cutter who was also a major soccer fan. Perhaps you already see the problem—the game was on ESPNESPN. ESPN has an excellent Xbox app that shows live TV almost in real time, but you have to be a cable subscriber.

A few month’s earlier, another friend hosted a Kentucky Derby party. Same issue—this was streamed through a computer that was using NBC sports LiveExtra, which basically starts the proceedings by asking which cable company you subscribe to.

The first example is pretty straightforward, but what about the second? NBC is broadcast over the public airwaves, accessible with an antenna, so why shouldn’t I be able to capture it to my computer without a cable bill attached? Aereo had an elegant solution described in three quick steps:

Now, your TV antenna is unbelievably small. So small it can fit on the tip of your finger. But it still gets awesome HD reception.

Your antenna is in the cloud. With lots of other antennas, all connected to DVRs and super-fast Internet connections.

Back to my friend, where the “big loss” is not having to pay Aereo’s subscription fee. Or a cable bill. And it is no secret what comes next.

“How are you getting this?” I asked the friend as we watched the World Cup.

“On my Xbox app,” he said.

“Friends’ password?”

“Yep.”

Yesterday NAB President and CEO Gordon Smith’s reaction to the Aereo decision, as quoted by Reuters via CNBC, seems to indicate what is most important to broadcasters.

“Aereo characterized our lawsuit as an attack on innovation; that claim is demonstrably false. Today’s decision sends an unmistakable message that businesses built on the theft of copyrighted material will not be tolerated.”

Well, maybe not a business but a consumer practice is currently being tolerated. For cord-cutters it’s an ethical dilemma on the lowest possible scale. The subscriber generally doesn’t mind offering a password in the same way we used to send around CDs ripped and burned of copyrighted music. It feels very close to a consumer right to share that password. For the cord cutter, it’s like taking mints from the bank: They can afford it. Even HBO CEO Richard Plepler was famously realistic about it last winter:

“It’s not that we’re ignoring it, and we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing. I’m simply telling you: it’s not a fundamental problem, and the externality of it is that it presents the brand to more and more people, and gives them an opportunity hopefully to become addicted to it. What we’re in the business of doing is building addicts, of building video addicts. The way we do that is by exposing our product, our brand, our shows, to more and more people.”

But ultimately the plan is to address those people, via innovation. Yep, innovation which, I’m willing to bet, centers around “affecting password sharing” more than finding ways to offer many choices at many price points to those addicts.

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HBO wants new addicts but won’t do anything about the attendant $200/month cable bill that those addicts can’t afford. It’s not really a moral dilemma, it’s an anti-trust dilemma. It will likely be resolved like the music monopoly was solved, by people movingly the content to fit their own needs. This from a customer who never has used content without paying for it. But I look forward to the restructured industry that others will force upon the Comcast’s, et al.

I agree with those points, no2areAlike. I have (usually) paid too and do now, but the choices are severely lacking and the costs outweigh the benefits that is almost a monthly question to keep or not. Live TV is still the major sticking point.

I have to say- I never understood why you would pay Aereo to do this service unless you lived outside the reach of a good broadcast signal. You just get your own TV antenna and a TV tuner card for your computer. You can get the software to display and record programs for free (with Windows Vista or earlier, use Windows Media Center; if later, XBMC).

No dilemna here- if NBC is putting it over the air, I’m watching it on my TV, through my computer, on whatever delay I like.

Now I will say this- if those tiny Aereo antennas are really able to consistently pick up a high quality signal, they may just need to revolutionize TV antennas instead. Mine (a gift from my amazing and beautiful wife) was about $70 and gets great HD, but gets hampered by things like planes and helicopters overhead, or really bad storms.

My experiments with rabbit ears has largely been bad — either inconsistent and almost always not every channel — but the question about Aereo’s antenna is an intriguing question. Reading the court’s ruling, that was the critical question. It would also address the mobility question, which I think we’ve agreed before isn’t the most important issue, but that would be interesting too.